The Ties That Bind...

At the time I saw them I was trying to remember the names and phones of the people who I believed could help me, I had forced myself to stay calm and focused, Bobby depended of my abilities to return to me and Amelie was counting on me. I had ‘retired’ six years before so I wasn’t being very lucky, so I went to the bar in the hotel and, as I ignored a bourbon I had ordered, I tried to get in touch with the last names I could remember. Most of them were either in prison or dead, the few that weren’t simply ignored me.

I wasn’t a ‘big player’ anymore, so they thought that they could do that to me...

Then I saw them. Four women chatting and drinking together in a table a few feet behind me, and one of them was none other than Helen Troy. The Helen Troy that was far more better in the ‘game’ that I had ever been. I had a file in the FBI offices, they only had data of a few of her jobs and no indication whatsoever of who was behind them.

I don’t know, perhaps it was the fact that I had just been rebuked by some guys I thought I really knew, or perhaps it was the fact that what Bobby’s kidnappers were demanding three different strikes on three different places on that very same day (and Helen was known for never ever do any job that she hadn’t planned a lot in advance about it)…, the fact is that as soon as I recognized Helen, and immediately also remembered which way she swings, I decided that I would grab the one between the other three women at that table that was her current lover and I would thus force her to help me.

I don’t know… perhaps it was my absolute desperation state of mind that made me not realize how many coincidences I would face in the next moments.

The three other ladies and Helen herself? Helen is in her early 40’s, about 5’7” and while not showing it, she has a great but not incredible body, and she’s very strong. The girl sitting at her left was the only black woman at the table and the most endowed of them all, all four were wearing bikinis and… man, that girl has a real big and round and firm pair! She and Helen were wearing white string bikinis, and by the way she was looking at Helen it was obvious that she would be the one enjoying mine and Amelie’s ‘hospitality’ in a short while, and that she wasn’t nothing more than what she appeared to be, a pretty face that wouldn’t make too much trouble as soon as I grabbed her… the woman sat across the table in front of Helen was Italian, mid twenties, the biggest woman of them four and showed some muscles under her black and blue one piece, if I was right about who she was (and I was) it was better not to engage in a fight with her. Finally, the girl at Helen’s right was in her early thirties, big flowing red hair and the second biggest pair of breasts, either that or she was wearing a green and red bikini a couple of numbers smaller.

I drank my bourbon while keeping a very discreet eye on them. I found something very odd about the four women’s interactions; it seemed that the black girl was somehow being fooled by Helen and the others. They talked among themselves and every time the black girl said something and turned to Helen, the other two had a twinkle in their eyes and a weird expression in their faces that lasted for less than a second, only to reappear next time the girl looked at Helen. Anyway, by the time they paid the bill and left the table I was sure that the black girl was my target and wasn’t a ‘player’. Then started the coincidences…

First they were coincidentally in the same floor in which me and Amelie were staying at that hotel, secondly they just entered the elevator and started to talk about how great that their vacations were being and how it was good to have a couple of weeks to themselves with no one expecting them at home so soon, third they seemingly didn’t found odd that I got out in the same floor than them and sort of looked uncertain as to where should I go (I am not a great actor remember?) since they were too busy chatting amenities between themselves as they walked to their rooms… then I ‘remembered’ the room’s number and knocked at the door while I kept my eye on them, as if I was wanting them to ‘wish’ me luck, and thus I knew in which room they were, which in the fourth coincidence were no other than the two rooms at my room’s door’s left.

Too many coincidences and yet I didn’t realized it!!!

Amelie recognized the pattern of the knock as one of our codes, it meant ‘act like you have just known me’. So when she opened the door I supposedly reintroduced myself as ‘Mike’, she called me ‘chief’ due to my ancestry and invited me in after a short chit-chat in which we posed as a couple who had just met and had obvious intents for the next hours…

I took one last look at the women at my left and the black girl and the tall and strong one mouthed ‘Good luck’ to me. I quickly told Amelie what had just happened and what I was intending to do, she felt uneasy about my plans but I remembered her that while I had been a great burglar/industrial spy and kidnapper (among many other things), she had been my apprentice and nothing more, and wasn’t a very good one as she quickly admitted.

So, to do the nearly impossible task that those ******* that had our son were demanding from me I would need help, professional help like Helen Troy could and would give me if she wanted that black busty babe back to her bed.

First thing first I went out to buy a large sports bag, big enough to keep a tightly hogtied girl as that leggy black babe inside without making it too clear for any casual observer or putting in risk her life. Meanwhile Amelie spent a whole afternoon with a glass against the wall listening to what was happening in the next room.

I know, very primitive, but she had nothing to do and wanted to be useful.

EXACTLY in a few hours they would have to leave the hotel for their ‘job’ that had brought them to that town, and contrary to what she had been made to believe, ‘Ada’ (she was sure that that was the black girl’s name) would not be allowed to go with them.

Truth be told, I did smell a rat with Amelie’s words…

…But then those ******************* sent another e-mail proving that Bobby was, ‘for the moment’, with good health and still believing that he was playing ‘hide and seek’ with his parents (he was just three years old at the time)…

So I couldn’t care less if they were that cooperative or not, if I was being oddly luck or not and if things seemed to be too easy for a while for me or not.

I would get Helen’s help that very same night!

It was around 10:30 PM that we heard them going out. I waited for about twenty minutes and then I made my move. At the time I didn’t knew, but in order to establish an alibi for themselves, Helen’s ‘girls’ had broken into the security system of the hotel and the cameras were not showing to the operators what was really happening in all corridors, only the recorded feed of two days before. As I didn’t knew I went downstairs and returned a few minutes later carrying the large sports bag and acting as I was drunk.

I had seen the Italian and the redhead entering room 44, so the black girl was in room 42. I quickly opened it with a special card I was carrying, of the type that opens any hotel door of these days (it was one of the few things I still had with me after my retirement), and when I entered I heard the unmistakable sound of gagged mewls.

I rushed to the bedroom and couldn't believe in what I was seeing. She was in the room, naked save for a white thong bikini bottom, the ropes and the scarves that gagged and blindfolded her. Her legs were doubled over and tied to stay like that, her wrists were tied to her ankles and her elbows were as close as she could take.

And she was furious and mad at me, seemingly having mistaken me with Helen.

I had no time to ponder on anything, so I grabbed her body – and her rage was quickly turned into fear as she realized that I was a man – and I covered her mouth and nostrils with my hands. A bit too rude and primitive, and she went wild as a hurricane instantly, but she also went limp after a few moments of oxygen deprivation.

Just for safety I wrapped a few turns of the roll of tape I had brought with me here and there to make sure that she was a tight package, lifted her from the bed and put her inside the sports bag. Then I left the room and was inside my room in a matter of seconds.

Ada was surprisingly calm and even defiant when she woke up a few minutes later, naked and bound on a bed in a loose hogtie and gagged and blindfolded with tape. She was waiting for me to make my move and, after nodding at the order to not scream, I removed her gag and her first words were ‘You don’t know with whom you are dealing with’.

In a short a quick dialogue I assured to her that I or my ‘partner’ didn’t meant any harm to her, but I needed Helen’s help and she was going to give it to me if she wanted her back. She recorded a message in which she stated to Helen that she was fine, drank a spiced glass of water that Amelie gave to her and was out even before I regagged her.

Minutes later me and Amelie were checking out at the reception, we went to our SUV and only after we were sure that no one was watching us, I gave an opening to the bag big enough for the bound and gagged sleeping beauty inside it breathe a little better. I checked the whole time if we were being followed or not, while Amelie every now and then checked Ada's pulse, but how could I know that there TWO tracking devices attached to the vehicle? One I could have predicted if I wasn’t in such a hurry…

…But two?

I wanted to leave Amelie and our captive in a place that while not far away from the hotel, to which I was going to return ASAP, would be safe and discreet. It was the very beginning of Spring Break and the town was a magnet to co-eds from all over the country. There was not much to chose and me and Amelie registered at a motel where co-eds from Alabama, West Virginia and Massachusetts were engaged in a big of a party.

No seriously, I was carrying a few bags and a large sports bag with a bound, gagged and nearly naked girl inside it through a hallway and a flight of stairs and no less than six drunken kids almost bumped on the bag! Our room was one of the two that were vacant, we got inside, got Ada out of the bag, both me and Amelie quickly made sure that she was overly yet bearably restrained... Alright, did you ever saw one of those photo shoots or fetish movies that depict a 'mummified' woman? You did??!!! – I would never knew... – Well, then you must have seen a picture of a girl with big breasts being submitted to that didn't you? Only the head, feet and breasts stood out of the mass of tape, wrapping stuff and rope that are holding her. Just like me and Amelie made with Ada after we realized that she hadn't been affected by the drug we gave her as we expected and, while pretending to be asleep, she almost got free of the ropes. So we had to keep her still AND we hadn't no more drugs to give to her AND we were in a bit of desperation...

I checked if the room was safe enough, give a big kiss to Amelie and told her to watch the girl with a gun within her reach and left in a hurry going back to the hotel. At the same time that Amelie (and Ada)’s would-be-killers were parking their car in the back of the motel and their soon-to-be-saviors were registering at the reception for the last room available of the motel posing as a trio of tourists from Idaho.

I arrived at the hotel and left a note for Helen ('Let's talk about Ada'), three minutes later she was knocking at my door in a state of barely contained rage with her two friends (whom she never told me the names and told me to refer to them as Red – the redhead – and Green – the Italian –) flanking her. They got inside, searched me and the room and when they were sure that I was on my own they pulled out their guns.

I simply showed them the e-mails Bobby's kidnappers had sent and then the files about my targets, and then I introduced myself to them. She knew about me, that job in Nebraska had happened over nine years before but people still talked about it, and thus she 'knew' that Ada was fine and would stay fine. And she, just like me, knew that the jobs demanded by the kidnappers were simply impossible to be made if I was alone.

So we split, Green and Red would go to the accounting firm while me and Helen went to to the house of a famous divorce lawyer of that state. Both teams had one hour and a half to meet at the house of a local VIP for the last job.

I was saving it for the last... but I think it's OK (for the good of the story) to tell you what happened in the motel meanwhile. Two of the 'tourists from Idaho' mixed with the kids in the party and even managed to flirt with a pair of co-eds, then they went to their room with the co-eds but 'accidentally' tried to enter in the room where Ada and Amelie were. Ada's gag was effective, but that was a motel (small rooms) and if Amelie opened the door...

So she quickly shoved (with some effort from her part and a lot of resistance from Ada) Ada's body under the bed, put on the best 'tired' face she could and answered.

She saw a guy with one of those colorful flower pattern T-shirts ('Hawaii style you know) and green Bermuda shorts between two a little intoxicated girls that were wearing a bikini bottom and a oversized T-shirt with the names and symbols of their university behind an apologetic big, skinny and 'intoxicated' man dressed as his partner. He had just realized that he was trying to get inside the wrong room and begged for her pardon, but as his 'buddy' dragged the girls to the right room he leaned closer to her and whispered 'Did you really thought that we would leave Big Chief alone on his own?' and slipped a cellphone to her hand. Then he resumed his 'drunk and friendly' act and went after his 'buddy'.

Not sure as to what had just happened, Amelie closed the door and went to the besides the bed. As she was kneeling on the floor, to better extract Ada from under the bed, it ringed. Ada's waist and legs were still under the bed as Amelie placed her hand over the tape gag and forced Ada's head to stay put over her knees, Ada tried to react but Amelie simply said 'You fool! They already know about you! So shut up!', and she answered.

The voice came from the third 'Idahoan', and as he talked Amelie could hear a ripping sound and his partners taping up the sobbing co-eds a few feet behind him. He told Amelie about the tracking devices on our SUV, about the would-be-killers that were lurking nearby and about what they would do... with her help. Amelie didn't knew if she could trust on him or not, until he called her 'Pocahontas'. It was her codename that she used when we and a few colleagues did a raid in a birthday costume party of a media mogul.

And he said that he had been 'Quanah', she made a few questions about how was the original plan and how things had developed after two of our colleagues got arrested by the police a few days before the job, he answered all of them correctly and she listened to his plan. He wanted to talk with Ada, but had to agree to just talk and Ada listen (no way Amelie would touch in her gag) and send afterwards proof that the co-eds were fine.

Of course she listened to his talk as well, she placed the phone between hers and Ada's heads, and he just said to Ada that he was a big friend of Helen as well and wouldn't let Amelie do anything bad to her or anybody else, so she was to stay put and don't try anything... again. No, I don't know what he meant with that. Do you?

They sent four pictures of each co-ed hogtied with padded cuffs, gagged with a huge folded cloth inside their mouths being held by a few strips of tape and blindfolded with strips from the bedsheets and lying on the bare mattresses of their room's beds. Front, both sides and from an upper angle at the girls' right. All in all exactly like 'Quanah' had done with the wife of one of the bodyguards of the media mogul years before.

Hours passed slowly and, against her better judgement, around 2 and a half Amelie freed Ada from the tape cocoon and easily put her (Ada was too exhausted from the many hours of submission to tight bondage) in a kneeling hogtie in one of the rooms corners. She tied the ankles together and then to her waist, so there was no way that Ada could stand for herself, and the multitude of rope keeping her arms in her back and as close as possible made her even more helpless. Amelie sort of made a barricade for them after she turned two chairs and the bed on their side, and stayed kneeling on the floor behind it with Ada's head in her lap, holding it there with one hand while keeping a firm grip in the gun with the other. Around 2:45 there was a knock on the door...

The co-eds were bribed with three thousand bucks each (I don't know how they explained to their friends the marks on their heads or even if they did it, and I don't care anyway) and a few treats, the manager of the motel cost them 700, and thus to the world nothing ever happened in that motel that night. But two guys went in the motel's premises to kill my wife (whom they believed was alone) and were killed and disposed of by the Finnegans.

Who they were I never managed to know.

Anyway, Ada simply HATED to be retied into a tight balltie (still wearing only the tongue bikini bottom) by both Amelie and ‘Tonto’, after a bathroom break, and put back into the sports bag, but the party was still going on outside (you know how co-eds are noisy when they party don't you?) and the Finnegans had to take her with them and Amelie by any mean possible, and that absolutely did not meant that they would let her walk of the room on her feet! (why they were so strict with her?), and since they had trust in me and my judgement they let my wife keep her as her captive until the ride was over...

But I am getting way ahead on this tale of mine, so let’s get back to the two raids I was talking about... Nothing happened out of the expected for Green and Red, they got in and out (with what they were after) without no one realizing it. Smooth as possible.

Me and Helen was another story...

The divorce lawyer was an early fifties widowed lady who had had four kids with her husband, the two boys were serving in Iraq or Afghanistan or both, one of the two women was married and living in another state... but was visiting her mother and her baby sister that week. And there was the faithful maid of the house to deal with too.

Helen took care of the maid, I never knew how she looked like or even her name, while I surprised the mother as she worked on some papers in her study. She was wearing a flower patterned pajama under a dressing gown wrapped around her waist and didn’t heard me coming. I had my left hand over her mouth in no time and she looked at my masked face with very big eyes, but not very surprised ones. She was expecting me, or rather, expecting someone like me? I decided to tie her up first and question her later.

She gagged herself with a sponge and two strips of tape smothered over her lips, then I simply tied her wrists behind her back and roped her ankles. As I was finishing I heard the front door of the house opening and two women singing a pop song. It was her daughters, they had went to a pop/rock show and obviously had had a great time.

I roped their mother to a chair by the waist and went after them. Both women; in their mid- to-late twenties, very well fit, with great legs and with the same auburn hair of their mother; found themselves between two menacing masked invaders in less than a minute.

Helen ordered them to strip to their bra and panties but they were frozen with fear. So Helen threatened them to have ME doing it for them and got their cooperation. Do you believe that the married one had a sexier set than her sister? Thong bottom included!

Anyway, Helen told them that they had nothing to fear from me or her. We were there because their mother had a very stupid client and we had to teach said client a lesson...

Of course it was all part of Helen’s plan! Do you really believe that she would do such a stupid move as to tell them what we were going to do after we left their home? Or that I would let her do it? Anyway, Helen wrapped a long scarf seven times around their faces after she used soft white rope on their wrists, arms, above and below their small breasts and grabbed each girl by one arm and forced them to walk with her towards the study.

We found the mother trying to cut her bonds with a letter opener, I quickly had her in my arms in a tight bear hug and we forced her to watch Helen tying her daughters back to back on the floor in that reverse position... I don’t know the name but it’s with the head of one person lying at the other’s ankle level, not that there was any chance of the girls choke each other by accident (no rope was wrapped around their necks just their upper torso), but they were stuck in that position, and stuck for good!, and afterwards Helen ‘admonished’ me for my sloppy work on the lawyer and removed the woman’s gag with a quick move of her arm. And what were the lady lawyer first words? ‘I know what you are after. There’s no need to hurt my babies, just take that ****** and leave, please.’

She gave us the combination of her safe, what originality she had had as it was behind a portrait in that same study!, and Helen opened it. The files that the VIP had taken from her husband’s study and that were worth (for some people) all the trouble they had generated.

My boy’s life had been endangered because of two pen-drives!

Then Helen did something that was really unexpected, even for me. She blindfolded the woman with tape (after she put a stocking over the lady’s head down to her nose to protect her eyelids and hair), regagged her with more tape and hold her tight between her arms, then she told her that ‘our’ boss was exactly whom she was thinking that it was... and that he was planning to betray and kill ‘us’ so we were going to give her a chance to call the cops. Somewhere, in the study’s floor, she (Helen) would put the letter opener and all that the lady lawyer would have to do was to wriggle around in the dark to find it!

Helen is that viciously ‘mean’ when she wants...

But it would grant us some time and attract the police to the whole business, eventually.

Anyway, she placed the letter opener right above one of the daughter’s head (can’t recall which one was) and we left the house, and I cornered her, put on my best ‘menacing’ face and questioned her a bit too harshly. My brain had been rebooted and I had realized everything, she had deliberately allowed me to kidnap her one and only in order to ‘force’ her to do something that she had already been planning to!

And you know what she did? She welcomed me back to the field!

In the short route to the VIP lady she managed to tell me everything. To put it simple, a stupid greedy ****** that worked for the Duchess as a frontman was embezzling funds from her. And he was even stupider enough to make records of his acts and keep them at home! And was having an affair with his secretary, and his wife discovered it. So the lady robbed a few important data from his study at their home, expelled him from it and was trying to blackmail him to force him to accept a division of their assets that was clearly unfavorable to him, by warning him that if he didn’t did so she’ll turn the data to the FBI.

Unable to call the Duchess for help, since he would get more than a ‘tongue-lashing’ for his errors of keeping records of his activities so clear and available to anyone, he decided to use some of the money he had took and a few contacts to get all the data back to himself ASAP. Somehow the Duchess’ organization found out about me and Amelie and especially Bobby, and he used this info to force me to do the job for him.

Of course, neither me or my wife or our son would outlive the night if his plans succeeded.

Since the Duchess wasn't sure if she could or not send someone to solve the whole situation, she's really a mean killing monster but has a soft heart for children in danger (seems that she was kidnapped with her mother back in Italy when she was seven or eight years old), without the embezzler realize it she had hired Helen and the Finnegans.

Then I had an idea and as if on cue she, after checking her e-mails in her phone, asked me if I wanted to see Bobby... His rescue had been the mission that she and Green and Red (and the Finnegans) had done as I kidnapped Ada!! There were eight pictures in the e-mail she showed me. The first four showed Bobby sleeping peacefully on a large bed in a dark room. There was even a mini-movie of him calling me ‘dumb daddy’ for not having been able yet to find him... The other four showed the current status of both Amelie and Ada.

They were sitting back to back with each woman’s arms tied under the other’s breasts, nothing really elaborated except for the absurd amount of knots in each woman's body (Barry Finnegan's signature), and were blindfolded and gagged with white tape. According to the e-mail Amelie had been allowed to see Bobby before being tied and taped up.

I still remember the words I exchanged with Helen afterwards...

‘Ok, I understand that you had to have Amelie restrained and helpless... but Ada?’

She thought a little in silence as she drove the getaway car and then decided to confess it to me since, somehow, she knew that I would understand her.

‘There are a few stories of The Phantom, from the comic strips you know?, from the 50’s in which he had to literally bind (and presumably gag) his sweetheart Diana Palmer in order to avoid that she followed him in his adventures, and threatened her own life in the process. I had to leave behind me a tightly bound and gagged Ada locked in our room in our home in Brazil in my last four jobs (she spend the whole time under the care of my maids who are anyway used to tie her up)..., for the same reasons. She has no problem with my source of income, but she is so stubborn!!! And... unprepared! And... and...’

‘I got it... so she wants to help you, she's clearly unfit for that (and it's really unnecessary anyway), and you decided to teach her a lesson using me?’

‘At the moment I knew that it was you who was being blackmailed... You must have tied up a hundred while you were in the field. Men and women and (a few) children. No one was really hurt due to that or the treatment you gave them afterwards. You're not a Pascal from Maine, a Hightower from Kentucky or a Ravager from God knows where, you're not like those *******. I knew that I could pull this fast one on her if it was you who would kidnap her. The ruse that me and the girls used on her was very complicated, I had to really pretend that I was going to abduct a supermodel (Chiara Bialone, have you heard about her? Brunette with lips bigger and poutier than Angelina Jolie’s?) that is going to meet her married boyfriend at that hotel the day after tomorrow (probably Green will be there to just rob them both), me and the others spent hours studying with her the layouts of the places we ‘might be’ going to strike... and now she realized that I fooled her, that we all fooled her, and must be thinking that you and I are old buddies. I really love her but...’

‘Trouble ahead?’

‘For us right now? Piece of cake. That socialite will be no problem to deal with. The dumb embezzler? He’s history, the Duchess doesn’t like to issue death sentences but in this case what option does she have? She has to send a crystal clear message to all her frontmen and women, ‘No one robs me!’... But you were talking about Ada, weren't you? She’s so lovely when she’s mad and impotent... and I have been thinking in a proper lecture that will crush all her arguments (that she won’t be able to say but I know them all beforehand already) and will properly expose to her all the risks that she might face if she decides to keep play ‘Ms. Palmer’ with me... And she won't be able to interrupt me as I do so!’

'More or less like I did with Amelie seven months before my last game... In that famous job in Nebraska she had proved to us both that she wasn't made for the field... So I had to convince her to stay behind even if she wanted to come with me. And I did.'

'Tie up included?'

'Your cup of tea, yours and Ada's, not mine or Amelie's...'

And for the rest of the short trip she teased me with 'Are you sure?' lines and looks. When we arrived at the place Green and Red had already taken care of the security system and were waiting for us. It was indeed a very easy job. We had the lady of the house, a former actress in her late forties whose body showed lot of care over her assets (she smelled like avocado due to a cream she had generously applied in her upper torso and face before going to bed), trussed up like a bondage model..., honestly the tie-up was way too unusual, in less than five minutes. Alright, alright. Have you ever heard of the tie called 'reverse pray'?

The hands are place palm to palm and as if the woman is praying, but they are put to rest between her shoulder blades. It takes some real flexibility, that the socialite's extensive yoga training had provided plenty for her, and it's not the kind of tie that you can leave someone unobserved, at least it was like it seemed to me. But anyway, as the lady protested and was generously tape gagged by Helen, she heard that police was coming and she would be freed sooner than she could think of. We quickly found the documents we were looking for and left the place. Police arrived not five minutes after that...

But they weren't cops... they were the Finnegans! Jennifer and Barry (who in case you have forgotten are cousins that really doesn't look like relatives) were dressed as cops in a cop's car and really looking like ones, they fooled the lady completely. She thought that she was being freed by real police officers and started to say right away who was behind it all and why, and what had been stolen from her house. And told the 'cops' about the copies that she had made of the data and with whom they were...

She was sitting in the back of the patrol car not five minutes later, after being both hand and ankle cuffed, ballgagged and blindfolded by Jen (who put the cop's jacket over the older woman's barely protected torso – it was a fine silk nightie but wasn't covering much). They called us and told us about the unexpected stop that we would have to make.

The second socialite we visited that night was far more older than the first, but the black woman sleeping with her in her bed was probably younger than Ada. A closet lesbian that enjoyed paid female company in her weekends, she feared more being exposed than anything else. Red stayed behind to tie her up and stage a robbery while we took the barely legal girl with us, at least Helen allowed her to redress before she told me to 'deal' with her. She had no visible marks nor looked like a junkie and was as much scared as her client wasn't, after I was done I handed her to Green who took her to a place a bit far away from town there she took her out of the trunk, removed her bonds and half talked/ half threatened the chick to keep her mouth shut. And paid her three grands for her silence.

Meanwhile I drove both me and Helen to an abandoned barn in the opposite side of the county. There we met the Finnegans, the socialite they had abducted, her soon-to-be-dead ex-husband and Double Deal Deborah, or Debs as she prefer those days, the Duchess' right hand. Jennifer was enjoying the pictures she had taken from the rookie she had replaced for her part in the abduction of the lady at her feet, who was crying the Mississippi and sobbing desperately with every breathe, as her cousins and brothers chuckled and looked at Debs with respectful eyes. Whatever Debs had said to the woman minutes before, it ensured her lifelong complete cooperation and muteness about that night's events.

And turned her the provisory frontwoman of the Duchess, after she inherited her late husband’s business. It took six months or more to find a suitable cover-up (and a new and this time really trustworthy frontman) that left her without the constant ‘care’ of her two new maids, her new chauffeur, three new bodyguards and a new lawyer/secretary... some says that she kept a maid and the lawyer as a parting gift from the Debs.

Her ex from his side was also a wreck. Like the Duchess had expected, he had been very discretely monitoring the activities of the organization with 'double' agents that he paid an extra to tell him useful stuff... not that a covert operation wasn't possible, use mercenaries with such a private army as the Duchess may seems paradoxical and contradictory, but it did ensure in that specific case that he would be taken down by surprise.

The thirty or so guys and gals all around the country that 'told him stuff'? The men received beatings harsh enough to send them to the hospital for weeks and the women... very good question, they did disappear from all sights for three or four days and when they returned they were (like the guys) demoted from their previous positions, send to another part of the country and knew better than talk to the cops. What happened to them during those days remains a private mystery within the Duchess' boys and girls, with many legends about it.

The kind of you may be thinking about right about now...

What happened to the frontman is of public knowledge. The Duchess really had no other option... He knew too much, wasn’t reliable and was robbing her. But she did manage to fool everyone into believing that it was a real accident.

Of course, nothing of that did matter to me at the moment, I just wanted to see my wife and my son and nothing less. So Debs paid the Finnegans and Helen and we left, the Finnegans went straight to the airport while me and Helen went to a small farm’s house. I don’t know what she did to the family that lived there, but if the rumors are true she paid their mortgage with the bank in exchange for the use of the place for a couple of days.

Amelie and Bobby were in one of the rooms of the place, he was sleeping while she was watching him without any bond or restraint ‘adorning’ her body. We kissed and talked with each other in whispers to not awake him, then we heard a commotion in the other room.

I went to check it, Ada was really mad at Helen, and was refusing to listen to any of her arguments while trying to make her own, even being as well gagged as she was. She was wearing a very sexy set of white and pink underwear, and lots of white tape over her legs, arms and torso. And Helen simply said ‘pick her up please’ as if it was the most usual of things to be said in such a situation! But then she told me that she didn’t wanted that my kid was awakened by her lover’s temper and saw her as she was then...

‘Then why don’t you just simply free her?’ I asked Helen.

And she said that if she did so Bobby would wake up in a matter of nanoseconds!

Ada tried to protest and as results her muffled screams were so loud that I had to interfere and grab her body while placing my right hand over her taped mouth. Then Amelie and Red and Green joined the party... Unreal, wasn’t it?

Amelie was more interested that we didn’t disturbed Bobby’s dreams than in the fact that I was holding a gorgeous black (and younger) woman in my arms! The two ladies were grinning and suppressing their laughter and Helen merely asked them if everything was ready. They both nodded and left the room, when me and Amelie turned to Helen she was holding an envelope in her hands. There were 100K in it.

‘A payment for your help and worries in the whole business’ said Helen, then she told me that we would have the farm all to ourselves for the entirety of the next day, but that she and her friends had a plane to catch so if I could take Ada to the SUV...

That girl was really wriggling furiously as I carried her OTS to the garage, the SUV had tinted windows, so no one would see that there was a girl nearly naked, bound and gagged sitting in between two women in the back seat. I thanked Helen for her help, she thanked me for mine and they left. To catch a plane!!!

The next morning I saw in the news that someone had kidnapped the wife of a pilot and forced him to open an hangar in the dead of night, she was found locked bound and gagged inside a SUV parked right at the entrance of the airport and the plane was found in Houston one day later. By then me and my family had returned to our normal boring life.